It’s the Andrews like you’ve never seen them before. When Adam hits record without telling the crew, he subjects the BiblioFiles world to a regular, old, unpremeditated Andrews family exchange. Once that’s finally over, we begin a discussion of Missy’s latest read, Virgil Wanderer, and revel in the beauty of Leif Enger’s recent offering.

Referenced Works:

– Libromania (closereadspods.com)

– Virgil Wander, Peace Like a River, So Brave, Young, and Handsome by Leif Enger

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Always winter. Never Christmas. That’s January for you. We need the perfect winter reads to get us through these dreary days. The CenterForLit crew shares their personal winter predilections and suggestions about what to read (and what not to read!) in order to survive until spring.

– The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom (with Elizabeth and John Sherrill)

– Rebecca by Daphne de Maurier

– The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis

– The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

– Dickensian by BBC, available on Amazon Prime

– Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

– The Adventures of Tintin by Hergé

– The Father Brown Stories by G.K. Chesteron

– Owl Moon by Jane Yolen

– Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs

– Song and Dance Man by Karen Ackerman

– The Mitten by Jan Brett

– Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton

– The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, Smiley’s People, A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

– The Night Manager by BBC, available on Amazon Prime

– Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie

– The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

To what extent is literature a product of its time? Is there danger in ignoring the historical context of a work of art? Or in focusing too heavily on it? Should we treat literature primarily as art or artifact? The CenterForLit crew takes up this question in our first episode of the new year! This wouldn’t be BiblioFiles if we didn’t start off 2019 with a tough-y.

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

It’s a special Christmas present for you from CenterForLit! Our Radio Read Along podcast is taking over BiblioFiles this week as Adam reads aloud O.Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi.” This also gives the BiblioFiles team some time off to rejuvenate and celebrate the holidays with the fam. We hope you enjoy this classic tale with your family and have a very Merry Christmas!

After receiving this intriguing question from a BiblioFiles listener, the crew settled in to indulge in an episode of pure, delicious speculation. Do you have a title you’d like to add to the conversation? Comment below with your suggestions for the CenterForLit reading list!

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

When Ian settled in to lead a discussion of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with his students, he looked for some way to tie the entire story together into a continuous narrative. Is there an overarching theme, or is this beloved Roald Dahl story just a series of morality tales? How is the tone in keeping with the rest of Dahl’s work? Is it possible to love something that just lays down the law on us? These are the questions that arise when the BiblioFiles team sits down to record a rambunctious, wandering episode without any prior planning or meditation…

Referenced Works:

– Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

– Danny, the Champion of the World

– Fantastic Mr. Fox

– Matilda

– “Paron’s Pleasure”

– The BFG

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

What is the secret to making a good booklist – for yourself or for your students? What belongs on the best booklists? In this episode the BiblioFiles crew chats about their own various experiences with making booklists and discusses how different personalities react to them. We talk about the difficulties a teacher encounters when crafting a booklist for their students and throw around some approaches that have worked for us.

Referenced Works

– Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

– Moby Dick and Billy Budd by Herman Melville

– Paradise Lost by John Milton

– Augustine’s Confessions

– The Gift of Fire by Richard Mitchell

– David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

– Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

– How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Have you ever had that experience where you read a book by an author you absolutely love…and find that you don’t really love it? It’s Adam’s turn in the hot seat for this What Are We Reading? episode of BiblioFiles, and he’s talking to us about Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. As one of Dickens’ most enthusiastic advocates, we were surprised to learn that he didn’t much enjoy this novel. We grill him for the reasons why, discuss the proper places of questions vs. answers in literature, and talk about the different aspects of Dickens’ writing.

Referenced Works:

– Hard Times

– Little Dorrit

– Great Expectations

– A Tale of Two Cities

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

What is poetry’s relationship to the literary arts? How is poetry different from prose or other works of literature? Why should we read it in addition to other works? In this episode the BiblioFiles crew attempts an apology for poetry while rambling on about all of their favorite poets and poems along the way.

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Is reason a reliable path to knowledge of God? Is faith a reliable path to knowledge of the world? The tension between faith and reason as a means to truth crops up all over the Western canon. In this episode, the CenterForLit crew tracks that conversation in the Great Books and attempts to battle it out for themselves.

Referenced Works:

–Anna Karenina and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

– The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

– Till We Have Faces, The Great Divorce and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

– Moby Dick by Herman Melville

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Lit, Period is back! And this time the team is diving deeper into a sub-category within American Realism: Naturalism. We discuss famous Naturalist hits like Red Badge of Courage and Jack London, and also spend time throwing around ideas about why anyone would want to read or study these often more depressing works in the first place.

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

In response to an insightful comment from a BiblioFiles listener, the crew sits down to tackle the other side of the authorial intent question: How do the reader's personal experiences affect the reading project? Isn't it true that no two people will have the same exact response to a work of art? How does this influence our understanding of literature's meaning? Join us as we continue this challenging conversation in a new episode of the BiblioFiles podcast!

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

In this week's episode of BiblioFiles, the CenterForLit gang focuses their conversation on a term that comes up quite a bit in literary criticism: mimesis. What is mimesis? Should it influence the way we read? Is it possible or desirable to teach literature mimetically?

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Where is the meaning of a story found? Did the author put it there? Does it live in the pages of the book once it leaves the author's hands? Does the reader participate in creating its meaning in any way? In this episode of BiblioFiles the CenterForLit crew sits down to try to talk through this complex issue with humble consideration, while making sure we stay on Anything But Deconstruction Road.

Referenced Works:

– Grammatology by Jacques Derrida

– The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

After we all make fun of Adam for choosing a cop-out selection for his WAWR title, he gently puts us in our places by demonstrating the beauty and depth that a simple children's book offers. We talk about the true value and audience of a good picture book, and then meditate on the very grown up ideas that are found in Patricia Polacco's Thunder Cake.

Referenced Works:

– Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco

– 'Til We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis

– Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Training efficient, influential, or virtuous leaders seems to be a major concern in our world today, but what actually makes a good leader? Is it a list of qualities? Or is it something else? Today the BiblioFiles crew turns to the Great Books to see what the tradition's authors have to say about this issue. And we look at a whole slew of literary leaders, from Achilles to Peter Pan.

Referenced Works:

– Beowulf

– Watership Down by Richard Adams

– The Illiad and The Odyssey of Homer

– The Aeneid of Virgil

– King Lear, Hamlet, Richard II, Henry V, I Henry IV, and Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare

– Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

– Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

We're back with another round of Lit, Period! This time things are getting real. In fact, we're tackling American Realism, that 19th century movement which reacted (pretty strongly) to the nemesis it loved to hate: Romanticism. Now Mark Twain is up to bat...and anything could happen.

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

What is an education and do we need one? What is morally required of a teacher or a student? The answers may seem obvious, but as educators it is often helpful to pause and reflect on our definitions so that we can realign ourselves toward our end goal. In this episode the CenterForLit crew sits down to do just that, sometimes getting feisty and throwing around controversial ideas to chew on. (But you're probably used to that by now.)

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Is there more to reading than simply comprehending words, sentences, and plot? If so, how do we learn more abstract reading? Is it something we know how to do naturally or is it taught? Does it ruin the joy of reading? In this episode of BiblioFiles the CenterForLit crew sits down to continue the discussion on this hot button issue.

Referenced Works:

–The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

–Moby Dick by Herman Melville

–The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Sign up for our Online Academy by June 1st to receive the Early Bird discount! Learn more here: https://www.centerforlit.com/prospective-students/

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.

Megan is in the hot seat for this What Are We Reading? edition of BiblioFiles. But unfortunately for her, everyone else is also reading her selection and had very strong opinions about it. (Is that surprising?) In this episode we explore Pierce Brown's recent dystopian Red Rising trilogy and loudly express our various reactions to the story.

NOTE: Red Rising is aimed at adults, and even so has some triggers that sensitive readers may wish to avoid.

We love hearing your questions and comments! You can contact us by emailing adam@centerforlit.com, or you can visit our website www.centerforlit.com to find even more ways to participate in the conversation.